Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

To Hitler, mesmerized by his own fanatical beliefs, as were his growing army of followers, the organization and plan­ning of the coup had been an afterthought. The plan was simply to pull the leaders of Bavaria aside before von Kahr’s speech, convince them to join Hitler’s putsch then and there, declare the revolution, and march on Berlin immediately. With Hitler, of course, in the lead.

Hitler got to the beer hall early and conspicuously loitered in the lobby waiting for Goering and his personal body­guards. As planned, von Lossow and von Seisser, as well as virtually all of the other Munich power figures, arrived at the Bürgerbräukeller to hear von Kahr’s speech. While von Kahr was speaking, Goering and the guards drove up in trucks, barged in, and set up a machine gun right in the lobby of the cavernous beer hall. On a signal from Hitler, the door was thrown open; Hitler, at the center of a flying wedge of troop­ers, pushed through the crowd waving his pistol like the Lone Ranger while Goering indulged his over-the-top flair by dramatically brandishing a sword. They pushed their way onstage, and Hitler quieted the crowd with a pistol shot into the ceiling. The revolution was on.

Angry that Hitler had broken his promise not to putsch without them, the three leaders, Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser, refused to move. Hitler, livid at their intransigence, dragged them into a side room and stuck his pistol in their ears. They still balked. Hitler ranted but was forced to return to the au­ditorium where Goering was trying to calm the restless crowd by telling them to relax and joking that “after all, you have your beer!”

Hitler strode onstage, announced the lineup of the new government, including the roles Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser would play, and swayed the crowd to his side. He strutted back into the side room triumphantly, knowing that he had forced their hand. But the balky triumvirate was only warm­ing to the idea. Then Ludendorff, the World War I hero who had lost the war, entered. He was Hitler’s closer, but his effect at first was less than fully Prussian because he was dressed for a weekend of hunting in a bad suit instead of his impressive uniform, to preserve the flimsy fiction that his in­volvement was a spur of the moment kind of thing.

Now the triumvirate realized things were flowing against them. Under Ludendorff’s spell, Lossow and Seisser agreed to join up, but Kahr kept holding out for the restoration of his beloved monarchy. He finally caved when Hitler told him the perfect lie: that the putsch is what the Kaiser would have wanted. Hitler would be in charge, of course, with Lossow and Seisser receiving plum roles; the unemployable Ludendorff would get to run the army again, and Kahr would stay on as governor of Bavaria. After taking over Munich, everyone would march on Berlin and complete the revolution.

The deal signed, they all marched back onstage where ev­eryone pledged to join Hitler’s revolution. The crowd went wild.

Outside, the night had finally arrived for the rowdy fight­ers of the SA battalions to prove their worth to the Nazi rev­olution on the cold streets of Munich. They gathered in the city’s beer halls, drinking and awaiting word to pounce on the levers of government and attack anyone who resisted the revolution.

Veteran Freikorps leader Gerhard Rossbach had been given six troopers and tasked to capture the Infantry School. The cadets gladly turned themselves over to the popular Rossbach, a hard-fighting Freikorps legend. Rossbach’s new cadets marched out with weapons toward the Marienplatz, the center of town, across the river from Hitler’s putsch hall.

Elsewhere in Munich, the putsch was having less success. SA troopers failed to trick soldiers at the Nineteenth Infantry regiment barracks armory into handing over their weapons. Other SA troopers got locked inside another armory by an army officer determined not to get putsched without explicit orders.

Meanwhile, Ernst Röhm, waiting for word that the putsch had launched, had formed up his SA battalion at the upscale Löwenbräukeller under pretense of a fun night out with a brass band and a speech by Hitler. Himmler was there, clutching the Nazi flag, his major accomplishment of the putsch. When they got the call that the revolt was on, Röhm announced it to the crowd and everyone formed up in the street, suddenly sporting firearms, courtesy of the master arms-stasher Röhm. The armed troopers marched off to the Bürgerbräukeller to join forces with Hitler, led by a brass band and picking up hidden arms along the way. Himmler, flag in hand, marched along proudly, finally getting his chance to storm into war.

The plot then started to spring leaks. In the confusion at the Bürgerbräukeller, a police inspector slipped out the side door and sounded the alarm. Word reached senior police of­ficers, who dispatched police to protect the telegraph and phone exchanges. With von Lossow, the head of the army in Munich, trapped at the beer hall, the police called the rank­ing army officer in the city, Major General von Danner, a monarchist who hated the Nazis. He immediately rushed over to help.

Another police officer, alerted by shouting in the streets that the national revolution had started, rushed out in his house in slippers to quickly secure von Kahr’s governmental office. The strutting, disorganized putschists were getting beaten on all sides by a handful of quick-acting middle man­agers.

Röhm’s noisy parade bloodlessly conquered the war min­istry for Ludendorff and von Lossow, but inadvertently ne­glected to secure the telephone exchange inside the building where loyal officers called around and found that Röhm, de­spite being a top military officer in Munich, should not be trusted.

When Hitler, basking in his glorious moment of newfound dictatorship, learned about the problem at the Nineteenth Infantry barracks, he rushed out of the putsch hall to fix the situation. He left Ludendorff there in charge of the captive Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. Hitler’s convoy then ran into Rossbach with his infantry cadets. He stopped to treat his new recruits to a fiery speech and then swung by the war ministry to congratulate Röhm. His convoy passed citizens out in the streets proudly strutting their officially licensed Nazi wear and the red-black-white of the old German mon­archy. The putsch-friendly carnival atmosphere filled the cool night air, which was exhilaratingly free of gunfire. The putsch was succeeding brilliantly it seemed. Hitler beamed.

Hitler finally arrived at the barracks, but the stubborn gatekeeper refused to allow him in. Sensing a glitch in the momentum, Hitler circled back to the putsch hall and dele­gated the barracks problem to von Lossow to untangle.

While Hitler was away, Ludendorff grew impatient to fi­nally retake his position atop the army and decided to release the triumvirate of vons — Kahr, Lossow, and Seisser. He, of course, received their absolute, Prussian-bound assurance that they would continue to support the putschers. The other putschers disagreed vehemently but couldn’t sway the aging general. And so von Kahr, von Lossow, and von Seisser saun­tered out, and the putsch unknowingly received a deathblow at the hands of its ace in the hole. Once freed from the putschers’ clutches, the von trio, who controlled virtually all the legal channels of power in the region, decided they didn’t want to work for young Adolf. They set off to save their own hides, and if necessary, sink the putsch.

Kahr bolted to his office where a representative from a Freikorps brigade told him that if Kahr declared himself dictator, the brigade’s 15,000 troops would invade Bavaria to support him. The cautious Kahr declined the invitation to kick-start a civil war. At the same time Seisser scuttled off to a local police command post and issued orders for the state police to protect themselves. Hedging his bets like almost everyone else at this point — to not move yet against the putsch — Seisser then set out for Kahr’s offices.